Tidal Pull by She Hawke

Two mothers and five children go to Crescent Head for a day at the seaside. They perch themselves on the sand between the open beach and the footbridge that runs across the inlet. The oldest child – a boy – is seven. His two sisters are five and four respectively. Their baby sister is one and the other child, a girl, is three. It’s an ordinary Australian summer day, a mosquito-ridden scorcher. The sandy beach is filled with people, the water is like glass, and the tide still.

Or so it seems.

The three older children play in the shallows and on the sand bar in the middle of the inlet. The other two play with spades and send beside their mothers who chat, watch and soak up the sun under the protection of hats and suntan lotion. Both mothers frequently look up to check the location of the children.

All is well.

Then one mother looks up and sees the girls floating towards the pylons that hold up the footbridge. They’re too far away and one of them looks distressed.

The tide has turned against them.

The rush of the current slams the girls into the oyster-clad pylons, their little hands sliced as much from their grip as from the cutting shells.

But they lose their grip.

Their brother watches helplessly and waves frantically at the mothers, his yelling made mute by the distance. The look on his face tells all. One mother sprints but by the time she gets where the girls were, they’re gone, submerged. She tells the boy to stay on the sandbar, gauging that he has about ten minutes before it disappears beneath him.

Drowning is a silent death.

She plunges into the water where she last saw the girls and gropes around for their bodies. Down, then up for air and down again. How far have they gone? She goes beyond the pylons and plunges in again, groping desperately until she finds their limp and bleeding bodies. With the superhuman strength that affects the body in such a dramatic situations, she hauls them, one under each arm, up the bank and out of the water and drops them onto the sand.

No longer superhuman, just a mother.

She turns them over and clears their mouths and they both vomit up their own tiny sea. They’re alive but disorientated. The mother huddles them together and signals for help as the older one starts bleating from the stinging pain of oyster-shell cuts, and the horror of her experience. She coughs and splutters and clings to the swimmers of the rescuing mother. The younger girls dusts the sand off her wet body, seemingly unaware of her bleeding hands and legs. The other mother approaches with towels, having left the three year old to keep an eye on the one year-old, with strict instructions:
‘Don’t move till I come back.’

The other mother swims out to the sandbar to rescue the boy from his fast disappearing island. Eventually they regroup. The mother of the girls who went under offers chips and cordial to the older girl who is still whimpering and clinging, and says,
‘Oh come on, a little bit of blood won’t hurt you.’

The younger girl dangles her feet in the shallows, watching her blood mix with seawater. The three year old sits in the mother’s lap, both of them open-mouthed as if they’re still taking in what has just transpired. The two families leave Crescent Head and drive home.

It’s quiet in the car.

Later at home, the two mothers discuss the day and remember the details quite differently. Ten years down the track, the four-year-old-girl has never fully recovered from the experience, having an enduring fear of water. The younger one remains fearless in all things. Several years after the event, the two mothers get together for a cup of tea. The mother of the submerged girls talks about how the older child has a fear of water that she doesn’t understand. The other mother reminds her of the traumatic day at the beach. Their recall is as different as two different as two different situations in time and place. One describes it as a traumatic near-miss drowning, the other describes it as the day the girls go cut by oyster shells.

- She Hawke